Escaping North Korea

5 Nonfiction Books About Life in and Defection from the Hermit Kingdom

Ever since I watched my first Korean drama in 2020, Netflix’s Crash Landing on You, I have been intrigued by North Korea and the plight of defectors from the totalitarian country. The television series follows a wealthy South Korean heiress who accidentally crash lands into North Korea during a freak storm while paragliding. She encounters a group of North Korean soldiers patrolling the DMZ who decide to help her return to South Korea rather than turning her over to the authorities. During her time in North Korea, she experiences the vast differences between her glamorous life in Seoul and the poverty and tyranny in a remote village near the border. While the series is fictional and idealized to play up the romantic comedy angle, a few defectors worked on the production team to provide details of life in North Korea portrayed in the drama. Recently, several teenagers in North Korea were imprisoned for watching this very show. Crash Landing on You has taken the world by storm, creating a new generation of K-drama viewers (including myself) and providing an important – though somewhat rose-colored – look into the humanitarian crisis in North Korea.

Known as the “Hermit Kingdom” since the era of Western trade expansion into Asia, North Korea has maintained that nickname well into the 21st century due its continued isolation from the rest of the world. Between the horrific famine years of the 1990s and the early 2000s, a steady stream of defectors risked their own lives and the lives of family and friends left behind to cross the Chinese-North Korean border into freedom. Since Kim Jong Un – grandson of the founding “Great Leader” Kim Il Sung – has risen to power, the border has become more heavily secure, making it more difficult to escape what is essentially the world’s largest prison camp. The following five nonfictional books provide accounts of life in North Korea and chronicle the harrowing journeys of several North Koreans defectors from all walks of life.

Note: Korean names are ordered family name first, given name second.

1 | Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Barbara Demick

The title of this book is taken from the children's theme song of the 1970 North Korean film We Have Nothing to Envy in this World. The film title is also a popular propaganda slogan. For decades, the North Korean government churned out propaganda claiming the country was a socialist paradise on earth, its leader Kim Il Sung was a generous benefactor, South Koreans were miserable under pro-American leadership, and the Chinese were starving. Citizens of North Korea would eventually see through the lies and either find ways to cope with their wretched existence or make daring plans to escape at the risk of being executed or sent to a prison camp if caught.

Journalist Barbara Demick follows the lives of six different defectors from various social classes in the North Korean caste system throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. During this period, dictator Kim Il Sung passes away, his equally despotic son Kim Jong Il rises to power, and a devastating famine wipes out a fifth of the population due to collective farming schemes and prohibition of free enterprise. From the poorest orphan boy to the highest-ranking university student to the true believer in socialist ideology, all six subjects come to realize they have been betrayed by the government and their only hope of a better life lies beyond the closed borders of North Korea.

This book blew me away. It ranks among my top five favorites across all literary genres. I was so engrossed while reading, constantly providing my mom with updates and excerpts. When I finished, I convinced her to read it as well. Each defector’s story is engaging and heart-pounding as they individually execute their plans to flee the country and obtain asylum. From one young man trekking across Mongolia with the intent of being arrested and deported to South Korea to a woman hiring a car and driver to kidnap her mother and drive her across the Chinese border, all the myriad journeys of defection make for engaging read. The author chose her six subjects in large part because they all adjusted to life outside of North Korea fairly well. As a result, this book is an unusually uplifting edition in the North Korean defector biography and memoir category.

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

2 | Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

Blaine Harden

North Korean political prisoner Shin Dong-hyuk is the only person born and raised in a prison camp known to have escaped. Born in Camp 14 in 1982, Shin is indoctrinated since infancy, separated from children who have experienced the outside world to prevent him from understanding how appalling his living situation is inside the camp. Torture and public executions are commonplace for the slightest infractions. Snitching on others is encouraged and rewarded. Prisoners live in horribly unsanitary conditions, constantly on the brink of starvation. As an adult, when Shin Dong-hyuk meets a fellow inmate who tells him about the world beyond the barbed wire fence, he becomes motivated to join his comrade in a break-out attempt.

This book was hard to read at times. The descriptions of the brutal, inhumane treatment experienced by hundreds of thousands of political prisoners incarcerated for ludicrous reasons are not for the faint of heart. However, this is a valuable source of information about what goes on in these prison camps which have lasted twice as long as the Soviet gulags and more than a dozen times longer than Nazi concentration camps — with no end in sight. The personal journey of Shin Dong-hyuk is gut-wrenching, yet intriguing as he grows curious about the outside world and struggles to adapt to a jarring new life in South Korea and the United States and learn basic emotions such as love and empathy that he was deprived of in Camp 14.

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

3 | The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Tyrant Who Created North Korea and The Young Lieutenant Who Stole His Way to Freedom Blaine Harden

This dual biography recounts the escape of one of North Korea’s earliest defectors who flew his Soviet fighter jet across the South Korean border into freedom at the end of the Korean War. While I found the half of the book dedicated to the life of “The Great Leader” Kim Il Sung interesting, I had already read plenty about him and the Kim dynasty, so my attention was focused on the life of pilot No Kum Sok.

No Kum Sok, later known as Kenneth Rowe in the U.S., just recently passed away. I stumbled across a news article written in memoriam, referencing this book and his daring defection. I noted the author Blaine Harden, who had also written Escape from Camp 14 (which I’d previously read) and rushed over to my local library the next day to pick up a copy. I was not disappointed. I found this book fascinating. I realized that no matter how many accounts of defectors I read, no two stories are the same.

The life of No Kum Sok was remarkable because from a young age – the first time he saw Kim Il Sung speak – he knew he had to find a way to get out of North Korea. This was before some of the worst atrocities had begun to occur. No spent his teenage years dreaming of freedom and becoming an American. At the outbreak of the Korean War, he maneuvered his way into pilot training, anticipating the war would be over before he was deemed combat ready. Guessing wrong, he ended up flying in several missions throughout the war, intentionally avoiding skirmishes with the Americans. By the end of the war, he knew he would soon be on the North Korean regime’s hit-list, having learned that his mother had fled to South Korea and that families of defectors were being executed. His opportunities dwindling, he seized the moment and broke flight pattern one morning and headed for the southern border.

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

4 | A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea Masaji Ishikawa

Ishikawa’s memoir of defection is unique because he was born in Japan, half Japanese and half Korean, and later moved to North Korea with his family as a thirteen-year-old. His Korean father had been kidnapped from Korea as a teenager and brought to Japan to work in a munitions factory. After years of living impoverished on the bottom rung of society, Ishikawa’s father buys into the propaganda that Koreans living in Japan returning to North Korea are guaranteed good jobs, housing, and free education – paradise on earth! – and decides to move the whole family there, sealing their fate. Ishikawa realizes the moment he sets foot in North Korea in 1960 that as poor as his family had been in Japan, they had never seen a fraction of the destitution awaiting them in their new country.

Unlike many other defectors, Ishikawa has not been brainwashed with communist propaganda since childhood. As a Japanese native, he holds no loyalty to Korea. I have read several accounts of defectors who, though they understood the horrors being perpetuated in North Korea, seemed reluctant to criticize the regime too harshly. Perhaps this is a result of years of indoctrination or misplaced patriotism. Ishikawa has no such reservations about calling a spade a spade. He bluntly describes North Korea as an impoverished hellhole. Though he immediately sees through the hypocritical peppy slogans and Kim Il Sung’s sickening cult of personality, he is broken by the system that no one has the courage to defy. After living on the verge of starvation for 36 years, he reaches the conclusion that escape across the Yalu River into China is his only path to survival.

While many escapees struggle to adjust to society in the free world (suicide rates are high among defectors), most accounts I’ve read focus on individuals who have made the transition relatively well. This memoir is heartbreaking as the author’s agonizing story never reaches a satisfying resolution. Despite his newfound freedom in Japan, his mother country’s lack of interest in helping him find a job to support himself or extracting the family he left behind from North Korea leaves him bitter and feeling his escape was all for nothing. I appreciate Ishikawa’s honesty and rawness throughout the book. The lack of a happy ending or silver lining speaks to the disappointing reality most defectors likely experience.

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

5 | Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Bradley K. Martin

The official biography of Kim Il Sung, founding member of the Kim family dictatorship ruling North Korea, is part fact, part exaggeration, and part fairytale. Author Bradley K. Martin pieces together information drawn from this mythical biography as well as from the testimonies of several politically high-ranking defectors who knew the Kim family personally in an attempt to discern fact from fiction and provide a comprehensive overview of the totalitarian country and its reigning dynasty. Martin goes into quite detailed accounts of the first two generations of supreme leaders (Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il), with limited insight into current leader Kim Jong Un regarding their extravagant and ruthless personal and political lives and the Stalinesque cult of personality upholding their legacies. He also weaves together many narratives of various defectors, describing their lives in North Korea and how they came to defect.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Kim Dynasty is how Kim Il Sung managed to create a nationalist monarchy in a communist nation, seemingly contradictory concepts. Using his knowledge of Christianity (his uncle was a pastor), in a disturbing twist, he banned all religion and established himself as God the Father and his son as a Christ-like figure to secure the people's love. At the time of the book's publication in 2004, there was still speculation over who would be the regime’s successor (Kim Jong Un would take over in 2011) and how it would affect relations with South Korea and its ally, the United States. The general sentiment of high-ranking defectors was that while North Korea had little hope of winning a war, the country might engage in one if provoked, with the notion that it would willingly destroy itself if it meant taking down its enemies in the process.

I only gave this book 4 stars because I felt the author jumped around too much, interjecting several different defectors’ accounts into the same chapter with little continuity. While I found the organization to be confusing at times, the sheer wealth of information provided in this tome is deserving of 5 stars.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

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If you are interested in reading fictional stories about North Korean defectors, I recommend How I Became a North Korean by Krys Lee and The Last Exiles by Ann Shin. I gave each of them three stars on Goodreads. Both authors obviously drew their information from some of the nonfiction books I’ve listed here. Though I enjoyed the novels, I felt the fictional narratives weren’t as strong as the real-life accounts.